Sean Bean starred as Sharpe in the popular television adaptation
Cornwell, a spry 81-year-old with a taste for cigars and wine, has no intention of retiring. He is at his desk by 8am and works through until five, pausing only to walk the dog and eat lunch. His wife, Judy, once asked him what he would do if he retired. “I said I’d write a book. So there you are. I’m retired.”
He does not plot his books. He follows his characters. “Sometimes they make the wrong decision. Then I have to get tough with them and say, no, go back. Go back to that crossroads and turn left instead of right.”
It has been a long writing life: he has more than 50 books to his name. This literary productivity has its roots in a strange and miserable childhood. His mother, a WAAF during the war, had an affair with a Canadian officer, who returned home. Their baby, born in 1944, was given up for adoption. The baby Cornwell had the misfortune to be adopted into an unhappy family, members of a fundamentalist, puritanical church.
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The Peculiar People were a sect, concentrated in Essex (he grew up in Thundersley), with an ethos that was strict and unforgiving. “They did their best, poor darlings, to keep us separate from what they saw as a sinful world, whether that was cinema, television, cosmetics, alcohol, nicotine.” The young Cornwell was rebellious and unhappy. His adoptive father, Joe Wiggins, tried to beat God into him. In defiance, Cornwell turned their taboos into a kind of “wish list” of sins, and has “since ticked every box”.
He broke free, finding refuge first at boarding school (Monkton Combe in Somerset), then studying history at University College London. As a young adult in the Sixties with his checklist of sins to explore he lost his faith and has resolutely never looked for it since. After a stint as a teacher and failed attempts to join the army (his myopia let him down), he began a career in television.
It was while working for the BBC in Belfast — he was head of current affairs there — that he met an American woman called Judy. Cornwell fell in love with only a little less rapidity than Sharpe falling for a foxy Spanish partisan behind French lines. He followed Judy to America, marrying her in 1980. After failing to get a green card, he sat down to write a novel, an activity that didn’t require a work permit. Sharpe’s Eagle soon followed.
Cornwell had been bookish since he was a teenager, with a particular love for the naval novels of CS Forester, whom he discovered at that impressionable reading age of 14 when the books you devour will mean more than all the literary titans you read as an adult.
Cornwell set out to write the books he wanted to read — a landlocked Horatio Hornblower. He thinks that Hornblower, the self-conscious and introspective naval captain, is a manifestation of Forester’s view of himself. But how much of Cornwell is in Sharpe?
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Cornwell ponders. “All the grumpiness,” he says with a mischievous smile, which makes me want to fact-check the statement with his wife. He has a daughter from his first marriage and Judy has three from hers. Cornwell’s daughter, like Sharpe’s, is called Antonia. Sharpe, like Cornwell, had an unhappy childhood marked by violence. It is part of what gives the soldier his drive to kill Frenchmen and rise through the ranks of a sometimes hostile army.
Cornwell wonders what would have happened if he had been raised by his real mother, Dorothy, who went on to have three children after the war. “I’m quite sure it would have been a much happier childhood.” An unhappy childhood, he thinks, was “useful” to him as a writer. He never writes much about his characters’ childhoods, he notes. They arrive fully formed and faintly bolshie on the page, often outsiders like Sharpe and Cornwell’s other most famous creation, Uhtred, the Saxon raised as a Dane.
Uhtred was born after Cornwell met his biological father, William Oughtred, when he was on a book tour in Canada at the age of 57. He discovered that the genealogy of his paternal family stretched back to Northumberland Danes, a line of Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and he saw a way to write a story about King Alfred and the birth of England.
He met his mother, Dorothy, a year later. Walking into her house he found shelves and shelves of historical fiction, including all his books. “I thought, well, that gene didn’t touch the edges on its way through.” He had adopted the name Cornwell as a pen name after finding his birth certificate; he also later changed his surname from Wiggins to Cornwell by deed poll.
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Long before the meeting Dorothy picked up Sharpe’s Eagle, his debut, because the author shared her name. She flicked to the author’s photo and saw the face, so like that of her Canadian wartime lover. She knew at once who this writer was. Was she proud of all you achieved? “She was very proud and happy,” he says.
Cornwell, like his characters, seems more comfortable in less introspective territory. He doesn’t reread his books. He doesn’t dwell. We talk happily about who was the better general — Wellington or Napoleon? Wellington — “May I remind you of what happened on June 18, 1815? The only time the two met.”
He tells me about his other passion: acting in a Shakespeare festival in Cape Cod, near his home. He does a mean Prospero. He was an extra in The Last Kingdom, the Netflix series about Uhtred. He wanted to be one of the “nasty bishops” but they made him a Dane instead. “I’m being murdered in it by my own ungrateful hero. I didn’t know that was going to be my fate.”
We talk about the swords he owns and where they hang in the house he shares with Judy. Sharpe’s heavy cavalry sword is in the living room. A replica of Uhtred’s sword was a gift from the fantasy writer and admirer of Cornwell’s battle-writing, George RR Martin. It is, as real Uhtred fans know, an amber-pommelled steel blade known as Serpent-Breath. There is something particularly neat about the creator of one of Bean’s most iconic roles, Ned Stark, giving Serpent-Breath to Cornwell.
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Cornwell is working on another book about Uhtred. Sharpe, however, is in Normandy bedevilled by peacetime. What does his retirement look like? “He made lieutenant colonel by Waterloo. Now all he has to do is stay alive and even though he is not a serving soldier, the promotions will come automatically. I mean he is going to die as a general. And I think he gets a knighthood for reasons that I’ve yet to work out. But he’ll still be living in Normandy.”
It is a long way from the slums of east London to Lieutenant General Sir Richard Sharpe. And it has been a long and “unbelievably lucky” journey for Cornwell, from war baby to grand old man of historical fiction. “I’m married to a wonderful woman, live in a wonderful place, earn my living the way I always wanted to. I’ve got a great dog. I mean, what more could a man want?”
Sharpe’s Storm by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins £22 pp368) is out now. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
